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Post by Leaf on May 8, 2015 20:32:17 GMT
I do happen to have a character (never before seen in glowfic) who both could and would provide full protection from memetic hazard transmission through the board. (The admin might be able to do it, but she almost certainly couldn't be bothered, since it would require her ongoing attention.)
Would people like me to bring her in, or would you rather I not? Bringing her in does close off the possibility of someone transmitting a memetic hazard through the board, if for some reason somebody wanted to do that.
-Kappa
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Post by anthusiasm on May 8, 2015 20:53:06 GMT
I don't have strong feelings about memetic hazards but I would enjoy meeting a new character!
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Post by Leaf on May 8, 2015 21:17:22 GMT
I'll bring her in if no one objects! But like, she definitely can actually prevent all memetic hazard transmission, and she definitely would offer, and I don't want to unilaterally close that door without asking around first.
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Hadassah
Regular
Posts: 107
World: Pantheon
Pronoun: She/Her
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Post by Hadassah on May 8, 2015 21:43:50 GMT
Speaking of memetic hazards, is there a general guideline somewhere? I am using some of my knowledge from books like Snow Crash, which talks a lot about informational viruses, but I obviously have very little knowledge as the expansive Glowfic universes of fiction.
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 8, 2015 22:36:10 GMT
It might be helpful to read Understanding Memetics and the sections of the SCP staff tag guide > Tag FAQ > "compulsion vs. cognitohazard vs. mind-affecting vs. memetic", "memetic vs. infohazard vs. meta". (Written about the SCPverse ("Keter"), but there's enough different stuff in that world that it makes a pretty good general concept overview.) I'm skeptical and curious about how a character can be definitely immune to all memetic attacks and make everyone else definitely immune as well, since for humans there's not really a clear boundary between memetic hazards and ordinary persuasion. (I mean, shutting down all communications would work, but that's not obviously better.) |
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Post by Leaf on May 8, 2015 23:15:32 GMT
She's kind of hard to describe, but I guess you could think of her as a goddess or anthropomorphic personification of a certain broad mind-related concept. When I first dreamed her up, I named her "Intuition", but that isn't quite exactly it. "Dream" might be closer, but misses in a different direction.
"Memetic hazard" is a category with fuzzy boundaries, but let's suppose that it's possible to draw a distinction between acts of communication and acts of informational assault, even if the boundary of the distinction is just "what we as the authors declare".
The way she is immune to all memetic attacks is that her mind doesn't function the way normal minds do. Knowledge enters and exits her consciousness more often by simply appearing and subsiding than through actual perception or memory. If there existed a pattern that it was dangerous for her to perceive or comprehend, she simply wouldn't ever perceive or comprehend that pattern even when presented with it. Given appropriate admin access, she could extend this protection to forumgoers: any message containing a hazard for a particular person would be replaced in their forum interface by... well, pretty swirling rainbows probably, given her aesthetic. (She can tell things like that through knowledge appearing in her consciousness, of course. Or just take the action without understanding why she's doing it. And she is not bound to linear time, so there's no trouble about her getting up for a coffee and letting something slip by.)
She has an Elspeth-like ability to state firmly believable truths, so if Mother Starlight will accept sparkly rainbow truth credentials, Inty shouldn't have much trouble acquiring the job of forum memetic guardian. If we want to let her.
She is very adorable, but obviously not well-suited to any plot that would require her to, like. Experience significant difficulty. And unlike the admin she is a nice and helpful sort of person with no particular aversion to doing things, so I can't even fall back on "she can't be bothered" as an excuse.
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Post by Archangel on May 9, 2015 0:32:33 GMT
Archangel might use memetic hazards at some point, like to forcibly give people "adequate" amounts of paranoia. Something along the lines of "if you absolutely insist on getting a demon to create SCP-[entire number line] despite all my warnings, click here for how to be safe about it" where the link forces you to decide not to.
If that would be replaced with rainbows because she considers it dangerous, I can always have Archangel scale it down from force to strong suggestion.
And other than that possibility, I don't have any reason to object.
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Post by Botanical Engineer on May 9, 2015 0:41:43 GMT
How would players be informed that they were being forced to decide not to?
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Post by Archangel on May 9, 2015 1:06:44 GMT
A not-really-apology from Agent ███████.
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Post by Leaf on May 9, 2015 1:10:45 GMT
If nobody else pipes up, I think I'll introduce Esthfora tomorrow, then.
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Post by Botanical Engineer on May 9, 2015 1:19:07 GMT
hahaha
I mean, that's terrible, they shouldn't go around doing things like that, but I approve of that method of letting players know they have been mind controlled.
How far afterward would the apology be? If it was too soon after the link, people might not click it because they know it's a trap. But if it's too long after the link, they might act as though they hadn't decided not to.
Oh! unless the apology is included after the whichever memetic hazard in the same link. Is that what you were planning? Or something else?
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Post by Archangel on May 9, 2015 2:47:23 GMT
Yeah, that last thing. It has the added bonus that everyone who reads it will agree it was absolutely necessary under the circumstances. (Barring interference from Mother Starlight, having a sufficiently different neural architecture, or CONSTANT VIGILANCE.)
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Post by Daniel H on May 9, 2015 7:08:16 GMT
I object to the example you used because Andrew wouldn’t conjure something against strident warnings unless his trust in Archangel went way down from its already pretty low point, at which point he would not click the link (or probably even trust the information that SCP-whatever was a thing he might consider conjuring).
I do not object to this character being added.
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Post by Leaf on May 9, 2015 14:57:21 GMT
So we have now met Esthfora!
I will try to explain her magical truth rainbows in a little more detail.
I feel like in principle there should be some way to distinguish truth effects that actually transmit the actual truth from truth effects that merely cause people to believe things. If you can think of such a test, and a character applies it, the magical truth rainbows will pass. (The closest I can get is "if the format is copiable, then the rainbows will only cause people to believe attached statements when those statements are actually true, not even just believed by the speaker but actually true." But that would give everyone on the forum access to an infallible truth-checking artifact, and I'm not sure you want that. Maybe it only works if the statement is both objectively true and genuinely believed by the speaker/writer...?)
Truth rainbows need not display the same way to everyone, but two things are constant: (1) there is some rainbow-like aspect to the message, synaesthetically delivered if necessary, and (2) it is obvious to whoever experiences the rainbows that the message is true. It doesn't force them to believe the message; if you have a suspicious turn of mind and go "hang on a sec, there's no good reason for me to believe these magic truth rainbows", you're perfectly capable of doubting. But by default, the truth of the message is just obvious.
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Post by esthfora on May 9, 2015 15:05:12 GMT
(Also, I forgot to mention - they don't propagate by themselves. If someone reads the forum and then tells somebody else "this poster said this thing and it was full of magical truth rainbows", the relayed message will not have any magical truth rainbows attached.)
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